Post by CCADP on Apr 16, 2006 14:53:43 GMT -5
Terror on trial: thinking about shining path, and those like them.(THE WORLD) Jay Nordlinger.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2006 National Review, Inc.
EVERY so often, the world relearns the difficulty of trying a certain kind of monster in court. Nuremberg stands as the eternal example; some people still think they should have been lined up and shot. In The Hague the other day, Milosevic dropped dead, frustrating his prosecutors, and others. Saddam Hussein, of course, continues his judicial theater. Although the judge in the case--currently Raouf Abdel-Rahman--sometimes gets the upper hand. On March 15, Saddam boasted, "I am the head of state." Judge Abdel-Rahman corrected, "You used to be a head of state. You are a defendant now."
A half a world away, Abimael Guzman is also a defendant. In the roster of 20th-century monsters, he has a place. The difference between Guzman and Saddam Hussein--and the Nazis and Milosevic and the Rwandan butchers and many others--is that Guzman never gained power. But in his country, Peru, he managed to kill at least 40,000 people, depending on how you do the accounting. He also wreaked $30 billion in material damage, and left a legacy of fear. Not bad for twelve years'work, accomplished by a former philosophy professor at a provincial university.
You may have forgotten Guzman and his movement, Shining Path, but I will inflict some reminding. Abimael Guzman Reynoso was born in 1934, and his university was in Ayacucho, high up in the Andes. He was a leader in the China-favoring faction of the Peruvian Communist party. In 1970, he christened his movement the "Shining Path of Jose Carlos Mariategui," after the founder of that party.
Guzman thought of himself as the heir to Marx, Lenin, and Mao. He had no use for the contemporary Soviets, viewing them as soft. The Cubans and the Nicaraguans--the Castroites and the Sandinistas--were laughable pipsqueaks to him. He reviled Deng Xiaoping, for his departures from Mao. The Communists he really admired were the Khmer Rouge, and he shared their totalizing philosophy. Guzman was openly genocidalist. At its peak, his movement had 10,000 fighters, and these included adolescents. They killed with particular ease and glee.
Guzman's plan was to control the countryside and then strangle the cities, conquering all of Peru through "a river of blood." The plan was launched in earnest on May 17, 1980, when his forces attacked a polling place in tiny Chuschi. This was deeply significant. Peru was just emerging from more than ten years of dictatorship; democracy was in bud. At Chuschi, Shining Path burned the ballot boxes. They could not tolerate any democratic flowering, because that was not the future they had in mind for Peru.
If you discern a similarity to the current insurgency in Iraq, you are not undiscerning. Indeed, to review the campaign of Shining Path in the 1980s and '90s is to be struck by many similarities to today's Iraq.
Shining Path took care to kill all the politicians it could--and all the government officials, and all the voters, and anyone at all who dared participate in the democracy. People refused to run for office, for fear that they or their families would be killed. Sometimes, when they ran and won, they immediately resigned. In 1988 alone, Shining Path killed 17 provincial mayors.
And they did a great deal more. They kidnapped, they robbed banks, they bombed embassies. They bombed police academies, they bombed churches, they bombed businesses. They killed anyone, foreign or Peruvian, engaged in relief or development work. Europeans felt they had to withdraw from the country. Just about the only thing missing from Shining Path's repertoire was beheading--but they made up for it by hacking to death with machetes. The stories that come out of the Shining Path period are as gruesome as any you have heard.
Testifying before Congress in March 1992, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Bernard Aronson, put it well: "In [Shining Path's] mind, any Peruvian or any foreigner who takes up the democratic cause, tries to ease human suffering, or resists terrorist threats is hampering the development of revolutionary consciousness ..." Abimael Guzman put it even better. Talking to his Central Committee, he said, "Our policy is to raze to the ground, to leave nothing.... In a war, what you cannot use or carry off, you destroy, you burn."
He meant every word. In addition to attacking people, Shining Path attacked infrastructure, which is another way of attacking people. They blew up bridges, irrigation projects, and electrical towers. They caused many blackouts--including one in Lima while the Pope was visiting--and water shortages. Their goal was simply to make life intolerable, to bring Peru to its knees. And they came very close. Peruvians remember this--it was not so long ago--and they shudder.
The similarities to Iraq's insurgents are obvious. And we might consider one more: Shining Path spread lies, preying on the ignorant. For example, they would say, "The American government--in combination with local lackeys--is poisoning your children with herbicides." Iraq's tormenters do no less. But while the similarities are obvious, there are dissimilarities, too. Michael Radu, a Romanian-born scholar in Philadelphia who has studied Shining Path, notes a couple: Shining Path had a clear ideology, and they also had a clear plan. Guzman was nicknamed "President Gonzalo"; his philosophy was "Gonzalo Thought." And his blueprint for taking the country was known to all. The Iraq terrorists are more ragtag and random, deadly as they are.
UPSTAIRS, WATCHING TELEVISION
Peru got its big break on September 12, 1992, when Guzman was at last nabbed, after his dozen years of mayhem and murder. He was upstairs in a Lima safe house--a not-so-safe house--watching television. Then Peruvian forces moved in. It was a historic triumph for President Alberto Fujimori, who five months before had staged his "self-coup," dissolving Congress and other institutions of democracy. His rationale had been counterterror. After Guzman's capture, Shining Path withered, for it had been highly dependent on its leader.
Guzman was tried in a military court. He was made to wear prison stripes, and put in a cage; members of the judicial panel were hooded. Lest you judge Peruvian authorities too harshly, for their undemocratic ways, remember this: Prior to this time, it had been impossible to try Shining Path terrorists, because their confreres kept murdering judges, or their families, or their friends, or anyone they could touch. In a two-year period--1991-92--Shining Path killed 120 judges. Hundreds of others resigned, unwilling to sacrifice themselves (to no end). Of course, those participating in Saddam Hussein's trial live under constant threat as well.
There was some question whether Guzman should have been killed--killed upon capture--and that question lingers today. This is almost always a question, when such a monster is apprehended. Do you do it the Ceausescu way, or the Saddam/Nuremberg way? In any event, Guzman was given a life sentence. The court could not impose the death penalty on him, for that penalty was reserved for those committing treason in time of war (against another country). Guzman was lucky for the leniency of even Fujimori's presidential dictatorship.
He would get luckier still, but more about that in a moment.
When Guzman was first tried in 1992, he had some support on the international left, but not complete support. The Nation magazine ran an article on the debate: Should leftists rally to Guzman or not? Some of the usual suspects said yes: Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, a Berrigan brother (Philip). Clark, as you know, is a member of Saddam Hussein's legal-defense team today. Back at the time, he explained to The Nation that Guzman required patience and understanding: "I met with Saddam Hussein, who is supposed to be the closest thing to the devil. If we want to have some peace in Peru, we have to recognize the humanity of all sides." He refused to utter any criticism whatsoever of Guzman or Shining Path.
Guzman sat in his cell until 2003, when something astonishing happened: His sentence was overturned; the verdict against him was rendered void; his trial was declared invalid. So it was with all Shining Path prisoners--about 2,000 of them. Put briefly, Peruvian democracy was embarrassed by the Fujimori period. And that period included the military tribunals that had locked away Shining Path. The entire lot of them would have to be retried, in civilian court. This threw the system into chaos, severely overloading it. Hundreds of prisoners--perhaps as many as a thousand--were outright released.
Not Guzman, of course. He had another day in court, and this one was very different from the first one. No prison stripes, no cage. Instead, Guzman was looking rather professorial, and he was surrounded by friends: his codefendants, old comrades in arms, including his girlfriend and No. 2, the dread Elena Iparraguirre. They all embraced and chatted. Reporters on the scene said it looked like a family reunion. The group started chanting slogans--"Long live the Communist Party of Peru!" "Glory to Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism!"--and pumped their fists in the air. Circus time. They turned the courtroom into a political forum, attempting to prosecute the judicial system itself. (Saddam Hussein would do exactly the same.) A judge remarked to the press, "Once a trial has this kind of atmosphere, it is very hard to continue moving forward."
PLAYING A NUMBER OF CARDS
The Guzman trial has moved forward, but in fits and starts. No one is sure when it will end. Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a prominent Peruvian intellectual. He says, "Peruvian justice is notably slow, corrupt, very unpredictable, and always very, very sensitive to the political climate." Fortunately, there is no support for Shining Path in Peru today--even the Left, the Communists, have no truck with it. But, as Alberto Bolivar--another Peruvian intellectual --points out, leftists in other parts of the world harbor a fondness for Shining Path, and they are waging the usual propaganda campaign.
Guzman and other Shining Path prisoners spend a lot of time talking about justice, their rights, due process. This is rich: For years, they dedicated themselves to the destruction of "bourgeois institutions" such as courts. Radicals elsewhere behave this way, too, of course, including in the United States: Kathy Boudin, Susan Rosenberg, Linda Sue Evans, and the rest of the Weather Underground used to scorn everything about "the system," perhaps especially the courts. To avail oneself of them was "counterrevolutionary." But after some years in prison, they started singing about rights and citing the Constitution. (In the waning hours of his presidency, Bill Clinton granted clemency to Rosenberg and Evans. He has never explained that action. Boudin has since been paroled.)
In all likelihood, Guzman's original sentence will be confirmed: life in prison. But it is also likely that he will appeal to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Shining Path is now playing any number of political, legal, and public-relations cards. The old Guzman, needless to say, would have roared against this.
And the Shining Path movement itself--is it dead? In Lima, there is a Terror Museum, designed to keep a record of those atrocious years, 1980-1992. The museum houses Shining Path soap carvings, music boxes that play Communist hymns. All of this kitsch has Guzman's picture on it. But Shining Path is not yet merely a memory. They are still in the jungle, killing people. In March 2002, they exploded a car bomb in Lima, near the U.S. embassy. This was three days before President George W. Bush visited. They killed ten people. (Car bombing, you may recall, had been a Shining Path specialty, in the worst days.) Then, when all those verdicts were overturned, the movement got a shot in the arm. They felt rejuvenated. The sight of their President Gonzalo and his lieutenants, whooping it up, cheered them.
As David Scott Palmer, an expert on Shining Path at Boston University, observes, lots and lots of Guzman's followers have been released from prison--so this has provided a reinforcement of a movement that had been moribund.
Some say that judges are again being intimidated, or bribed. Certain Peruvians are calling for the return of the hoods--to protect judges. And Peruvian democracy in general seems in a fragile state. Alberto Bolivar is one who believes that Shining Path is biding its time, waiting to launch another, all-out campaign. And most agree that Guzman's continued existence is a comfort and inspiration to the guerrillas now in operation, or waiting. This same kind of talk, of course, is heard in, and about, Iraq.
It might have been neater if Fujimori's men had simply snuffed Guzman, on that glorious, saving day of September 12, 1992. But civilized people do not operate that way--do not operate as Guzman does, and as Saddam does. Each of those is having his day in court, or many days. And even as they create their circuses, they are being tried for what they have done. And maybe people, all over, see that the way of the brute does not--with awful inevitability--triumph.
Article A143763787
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2006 National Review, Inc.
EVERY so often, the world relearns the difficulty of trying a certain kind of monster in court. Nuremberg stands as the eternal example; some people still think they should have been lined up and shot. In The Hague the other day, Milosevic dropped dead, frustrating his prosecutors, and others. Saddam Hussein, of course, continues his judicial theater. Although the judge in the case--currently Raouf Abdel-Rahman--sometimes gets the upper hand. On March 15, Saddam boasted, "I am the head of state." Judge Abdel-Rahman corrected, "You used to be a head of state. You are a defendant now."
A half a world away, Abimael Guzman is also a defendant. In the roster of 20th-century monsters, he has a place. The difference between Guzman and Saddam Hussein--and the Nazis and Milosevic and the Rwandan butchers and many others--is that Guzman never gained power. But in his country, Peru, he managed to kill at least 40,000 people, depending on how you do the accounting. He also wreaked $30 billion in material damage, and left a legacy of fear. Not bad for twelve years'work, accomplished by a former philosophy professor at a provincial university.
You may have forgotten Guzman and his movement, Shining Path, but I will inflict some reminding. Abimael Guzman Reynoso was born in 1934, and his university was in Ayacucho, high up in the Andes. He was a leader in the China-favoring faction of the Peruvian Communist party. In 1970, he christened his movement the "Shining Path of Jose Carlos Mariategui," after the founder of that party.
Guzman thought of himself as the heir to Marx, Lenin, and Mao. He had no use for the contemporary Soviets, viewing them as soft. The Cubans and the Nicaraguans--the Castroites and the Sandinistas--were laughable pipsqueaks to him. He reviled Deng Xiaoping, for his departures from Mao. The Communists he really admired were the Khmer Rouge, and he shared their totalizing philosophy. Guzman was openly genocidalist. At its peak, his movement had 10,000 fighters, and these included adolescents. They killed with particular ease and glee.
Guzman's plan was to control the countryside and then strangle the cities, conquering all of Peru through "a river of blood." The plan was launched in earnest on May 17, 1980, when his forces attacked a polling place in tiny Chuschi. This was deeply significant. Peru was just emerging from more than ten years of dictatorship; democracy was in bud. At Chuschi, Shining Path burned the ballot boxes. They could not tolerate any democratic flowering, because that was not the future they had in mind for Peru.
If you discern a similarity to the current insurgency in Iraq, you are not undiscerning. Indeed, to review the campaign of Shining Path in the 1980s and '90s is to be struck by many similarities to today's Iraq.
Shining Path took care to kill all the politicians it could--and all the government officials, and all the voters, and anyone at all who dared participate in the democracy. People refused to run for office, for fear that they or their families would be killed. Sometimes, when they ran and won, they immediately resigned. In 1988 alone, Shining Path killed 17 provincial mayors.
And they did a great deal more. They kidnapped, they robbed banks, they bombed embassies. They bombed police academies, they bombed churches, they bombed businesses. They killed anyone, foreign or Peruvian, engaged in relief or development work. Europeans felt they had to withdraw from the country. Just about the only thing missing from Shining Path's repertoire was beheading--but they made up for it by hacking to death with machetes. The stories that come out of the Shining Path period are as gruesome as any you have heard.
Testifying before Congress in March 1992, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Bernard Aronson, put it well: "In [Shining Path's] mind, any Peruvian or any foreigner who takes up the democratic cause, tries to ease human suffering, or resists terrorist threats is hampering the development of revolutionary consciousness ..." Abimael Guzman put it even better. Talking to his Central Committee, he said, "Our policy is to raze to the ground, to leave nothing.... In a war, what you cannot use or carry off, you destroy, you burn."
He meant every word. In addition to attacking people, Shining Path attacked infrastructure, which is another way of attacking people. They blew up bridges, irrigation projects, and electrical towers. They caused many blackouts--including one in Lima while the Pope was visiting--and water shortages. Their goal was simply to make life intolerable, to bring Peru to its knees. And they came very close. Peruvians remember this--it was not so long ago--and they shudder.
The similarities to Iraq's insurgents are obvious. And we might consider one more: Shining Path spread lies, preying on the ignorant. For example, they would say, "The American government--in combination with local lackeys--is poisoning your children with herbicides." Iraq's tormenters do no less. But while the similarities are obvious, there are dissimilarities, too. Michael Radu, a Romanian-born scholar in Philadelphia who has studied Shining Path, notes a couple: Shining Path had a clear ideology, and they also had a clear plan. Guzman was nicknamed "President Gonzalo"; his philosophy was "Gonzalo Thought." And his blueprint for taking the country was known to all. The Iraq terrorists are more ragtag and random, deadly as they are.
UPSTAIRS, WATCHING TELEVISION
Peru got its big break on September 12, 1992, when Guzman was at last nabbed, after his dozen years of mayhem and murder. He was upstairs in a Lima safe house--a not-so-safe house--watching television. Then Peruvian forces moved in. It was a historic triumph for President Alberto Fujimori, who five months before had staged his "self-coup," dissolving Congress and other institutions of democracy. His rationale had been counterterror. After Guzman's capture, Shining Path withered, for it had been highly dependent on its leader.
Guzman was tried in a military court. He was made to wear prison stripes, and put in a cage; members of the judicial panel were hooded. Lest you judge Peruvian authorities too harshly, for their undemocratic ways, remember this: Prior to this time, it had been impossible to try Shining Path terrorists, because their confreres kept murdering judges, or their families, or their friends, or anyone they could touch. In a two-year period--1991-92--Shining Path killed 120 judges. Hundreds of others resigned, unwilling to sacrifice themselves (to no end). Of course, those participating in Saddam Hussein's trial live under constant threat as well.
There was some question whether Guzman should have been killed--killed upon capture--and that question lingers today. This is almost always a question, when such a monster is apprehended. Do you do it the Ceausescu way, or the Saddam/Nuremberg way? In any event, Guzman was given a life sentence. The court could not impose the death penalty on him, for that penalty was reserved for those committing treason in time of war (against another country). Guzman was lucky for the leniency of even Fujimori's presidential dictatorship.
He would get luckier still, but more about that in a moment.
When Guzman was first tried in 1992, he had some support on the international left, but not complete support. The Nation magazine ran an article on the debate: Should leftists rally to Guzman or not? Some of the usual suspects said yes: Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, a Berrigan brother (Philip). Clark, as you know, is a member of Saddam Hussein's legal-defense team today. Back at the time, he explained to The Nation that Guzman required patience and understanding: "I met with Saddam Hussein, who is supposed to be the closest thing to the devil. If we want to have some peace in Peru, we have to recognize the humanity of all sides." He refused to utter any criticism whatsoever of Guzman or Shining Path.
Guzman sat in his cell until 2003, when something astonishing happened: His sentence was overturned; the verdict against him was rendered void; his trial was declared invalid. So it was with all Shining Path prisoners--about 2,000 of them. Put briefly, Peruvian democracy was embarrassed by the Fujimori period. And that period included the military tribunals that had locked away Shining Path. The entire lot of them would have to be retried, in civilian court. This threw the system into chaos, severely overloading it. Hundreds of prisoners--perhaps as many as a thousand--were outright released.
Not Guzman, of course. He had another day in court, and this one was very different from the first one. No prison stripes, no cage. Instead, Guzman was looking rather professorial, and he was surrounded by friends: his codefendants, old comrades in arms, including his girlfriend and No. 2, the dread Elena Iparraguirre. They all embraced and chatted. Reporters on the scene said it looked like a family reunion. The group started chanting slogans--"Long live the Communist Party of Peru!" "Glory to Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism!"--and pumped their fists in the air. Circus time. They turned the courtroom into a political forum, attempting to prosecute the judicial system itself. (Saddam Hussein would do exactly the same.) A judge remarked to the press, "Once a trial has this kind of atmosphere, it is very hard to continue moving forward."
PLAYING A NUMBER OF CARDS
The Guzman trial has moved forward, but in fits and starts. No one is sure when it will end. Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a prominent Peruvian intellectual. He says, "Peruvian justice is notably slow, corrupt, very unpredictable, and always very, very sensitive to the political climate." Fortunately, there is no support for Shining Path in Peru today--even the Left, the Communists, have no truck with it. But, as Alberto Bolivar--another Peruvian intellectual --points out, leftists in other parts of the world harbor a fondness for Shining Path, and they are waging the usual propaganda campaign.
Guzman and other Shining Path prisoners spend a lot of time talking about justice, their rights, due process. This is rich: For years, they dedicated themselves to the destruction of "bourgeois institutions" such as courts. Radicals elsewhere behave this way, too, of course, including in the United States: Kathy Boudin, Susan Rosenberg, Linda Sue Evans, and the rest of the Weather Underground used to scorn everything about "the system," perhaps especially the courts. To avail oneself of them was "counterrevolutionary." But after some years in prison, they started singing about rights and citing the Constitution. (In the waning hours of his presidency, Bill Clinton granted clemency to Rosenberg and Evans. He has never explained that action. Boudin has since been paroled.)
In all likelihood, Guzman's original sentence will be confirmed: life in prison. But it is also likely that he will appeal to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Shining Path is now playing any number of political, legal, and public-relations cards. The old Guzman, needless to say, would have roared against this.
And the Shining Path movement itself--is it dead? In Lima, there is a Terror Museum, designed to keep a record of those atrocious years, 1980-1992. The museum houses Shining Path soap carvings, music boxes that play Communist hymns. All of this kitsch has Guzman's picture on it. But Shining Path is not yet merely a memory. They are still in the jungle, killing people. In March 2002, they exploded a car bomb in Lima, near the U.S. embassy. This was three days before President George W. Bush visited. They killed ten people. (Car bombing, you may recall, had been a Shining Path specialty, in the worst days.) Then, when all those verdicts were overturned, the movement got a shot in the arm. They felt rejuvenated. The sight of their President Gonzalo and his lieutenants, whooping it up, cheered them.
As David Scott Palmer, an expert on Shining Path at Boston University, observes, lots and lots of Guzman's followers have been released from prison--so this has provided a reinforcement of a movement that had been moribund.
Some say that judges are again being intimidated, or bribed. Certain Peruvians are calling for the return of the hoods--to protect judges. And Peruvian democracy in general seems in a fragile state. Alberto Bolivar is one who believes that Shining Path is biding its time, waiting to launch another, all-out campaign. And most agree that Guzman's continued existence is a comfort and inspiration to the guerrillas now in operation, or waiting. This same kind of talk, of course, is heard in, and about, Iraq.
It might have been neater if Fujimori's men had simply snuffed Guzman, on that glorious, saving day of September 12, 1992. But civilized people do not operate that way--do not operate as Guzman does, and as Saddam does. Each of those is having his day in court, or many days. And even as they create their circuses, they are being tried for what they have done. And maybe people, all over, see that the way of the brute does not--with awful inevitability--triumph.
Article A143763787